The No. 8 USC men’s tennis team beat No. 24 Harvard 4-0 at Marks Tennis Stadium Sunday afternoon. The Trojans will move on to the ITA National Team Indoor Championship set to take place Feb. 18-21 in Seattle, Wash.
USC junior Stefan Dostanic took the court alongside his doubles partner, senior Bradley Frye, facing off against Harvard senior Brian Shi and freshman Daniel Milavsky. Looking to pick up momentum, USC took a 1-0 lead when Dostanic and Frye took the match 6-3.
Soon after, junior Ryder Jackson and freshman Wojtek Marek put an end to doubles play, earning USC the doubles point by beating junior Harris Walker and sophomore Ronan Jachuck 6-4.
“Doubles is like a 100-yard dash,” USC head coach Brett Masi said after the match — adding that everything they worked on during the week was successfully transcribed onto the court. “You have to get off to a good start because it’s a set to six with no ad scoring. It can go in a blink of an eye.”
The singles matches turned out to be equally engaging with finishes that put the audience on the edge of its seat. USC freshman Ryan Colby was the first to finish with a 6-3, 6-4 win over Harvard sophomore Ronan Jachuck. USC later went up 3-0 with Jackson’s 6-2, 6-2 victory over junior Steven Sun.
It all began to further intensify after that victory with the remaining four games going off to an extra set.
Frye showed great mental and physical force coming back in the first set of his singles match. After being down at the start of that set, Frye was able to force a six-point tiebreaker where he then took the set 7-6. But in the end, it was freshman Peter Makk whose 6-3, 4-6, 6-3 win gave USC the final point for the 4-0 team victory.
“We knew Harvard was going to be really tough, especially at the top,” Masi said. “Our guys went to third sets in all of those matches. Hopefully [Makk] could have finished that out in straights maybe, but either way he took control of the third and had a very convincing win.”
Still ahead of the Trojans is a tough road trip to Northern California where they will face UC Berkeley and No. 14 Stanford. They will then face Portland before their appearance in the ITA National Team Indoor Championship.